Dr. Lissa V. Young, Ph.D.

Dr. Lissa Young is an associate professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences & Leadership (BSL), where she teaches in the management program, at the United States Military Academy (USMA) in West Point, New York. 

She is a 1986 USMA graduate and a former Army aviator, flying CH-47D “Chinook” cargo helicopters. Dr. Young then served as the BSL course director for PL300, the academy's core course in leadership, from 1996-99.

After graduating from the Army’s Command and General staff College in 2000, she was selected to take command of the U.S. Army’s only High-Altitude Search and Rescue Chinook unit and was stationed in Fairbanks, Alaska. While there, Dr. Young led the effort to exhume a 90-million-year-old Ichthyosaur fossil from the rocky faces of the Brooks Range north of the Arctic Circle. This highly coveted specimen had been monitored for nearly 30 years by the archeological scholars of the University of Alaska. 

Dr. Young, seeing the opportunity to put her military helicopters and crews in the service of good, designed an extraction mission under the auspices of “Army Training." Also, while serving in that command, she deployed to and flew counterdrug operations for the government of Thailand along the Myanmar border.

In 2007, she was awarded a Presidential Fellowship by Harvard University, and in 2013 earned her doctorate there. Her research examines assessments of competence in high-performance teams, and how war has influenced the development and direction of the discipline of social psychology.